Its been a rough week for Microsoft in the secrecy department.
First pictures of its Courier
bi-screen multi-touch tablet leaked, and now pictures of its upcoming
smart phone hardware, codenamed "Pink" have also hit the internet, courtesy of Gizmodo.
The site posted
pictures of two upcoming Microsoft
phones, which it swears are 100 percent authentic.

The
first phone is dubbed "Turtle" and looks akin to a squat
Palm Pre. Like the Pre, it has a sliding screen to feature a
QWERTY keyboard. It looks like it has a head phone jack on its
top and a microSD card to the left of the keyboard. On the back
face there's a camera and what looks like possibly a flash.

The
second Pink phone, the "Pure" looks kind of like the "Slide" variant of the T-Mobile
Sidekick or the Samsung A877. It appears to have a memory card slot below the
keyboard, a headphones jack to the left of the keyboard, and a
flash+camera in the back.

The phone's similarity to the
Sidekick is hardly coincidental. Microsoft bought
Danger, one of the makers of the Sidekick's interface, almost two
years ago. And Microsoft has partnered with Sharp to produce
the hardware for the phones -- and you guessed it, Sharp made the
Sidekick's hardware. The phones will be Microsoft and Sharp
cobranded.

Reportedly the phones will be receiving Zune
services features (such as the Zune Pass subscription service) and
will also have its own app store.

Will the phone's be
competitive with the iPhone, currently the most popular consumer
smartphone on the market in terms of "toy" appeal?
It's hard to say. The phones are bulkier and have larger
screens. However, they will also likely feature the powerful
Windows 7 Mobile OS, and have a physical keyboard, a welcome step
up from the iPhone's virtual keyboard. One immediate question
that has not yet been answered is whether they might be packing
NVIDIA's Tegra onboard, like the new Zune HD. If they
have it, they could be competitive gaming platforms to the iPhone as
well.

Early comments regarding the images have not been kind
to Microsoft, though, with some bloggers saying the phones look like
uglier version of the Sidekick, and inferior to the iPhone/Palm Pre.

"Well, we didn't have anyone in line that got shot waiting for our system." -- Nintendo of America Vice President Perrin Kaplan